Framework For Forecasting Research Articles

Development of New Electricity System Marginal Price Forecasting Models Using Statistical and Artificial Intelligence Methods

The System Marginal Price (SMP) is the cost of the last unit of electricity supplied to the grid, reflecting the supply–demand equilibrium and serving as a key indicator of market conditions. Accurate SMP forecasting is essential for ensuring market stability and economic efficiency. This study addresses the challenges of SMP prediction in Turkey by proposing a comprehensive forecasting framework that integrates machine learning, deep learning, and statistical models. Advanced feature selection techniques, such as Minimum Redundancy Maximum Relevance (mRMR) and Maximum Likelihood Feature Selector (MLFS), are employed to refine model inputs. The framework incorporates time series methods like Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM (Bi-LSTM), and Convolutional LSTM (ConvLSTM) to capture complex temporal patterns, alongside models such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) for modeling non-linear relationships. Model performance was evaluated using the Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) across regular weekdays, weekends, and public holidays. XGBoost combined with MLFS consistently achieved the lowest MAPE values, demonstrating exceptional accuracy and robustness. Among all of the models, XGBoost combined with MLFS consistently achieved the lowest MAPE values, demonstrating superior accuracy and robustness. The results highlight the inadequacy of traditional models like ARIMA and SARIMA in capturing non-linear and highly volatile patterns, reinforcing the necessity of using advanced techniques for effective SMP forecasting. Overall, this study presents a novel and comprehensive approach tailored for complex electricity markets, significantly enhancing predictive reliability by incorporating economic indicators and sophisticated feature selection methods.

Forecasting Market Activity and Aggregate Demand in China Using Time Series Models

The purpose of this study was to forecast market activity and aggregate demand in China using time series models. Forecasts of market activity (MA) and aggregate demand (AD) provide insights into consumer behavior and economic trends, which are crucial for policymakers and businesses alike. In order to forecast the MA and AD in China, this study uses the time series model, especially the exponential smoothing model. Based on the increase rates of M1 and M2 money supply, respectively, and the difference in increase rates between them. These indicators are necessary to assess MA and AD and reflect changes in money liquidity and people's spending behavior. The results suggest that people will be less willing to spend and more inclined to save in the coming years. This finding suggests that MA may decline as consumers become more cautious and prioritize saving over spending. This trend could be attributed to a variety of factors, including economic uncertainty or changes in monetary policy. The implications of this research are significant because it provides a forecasting framework that can help policymakers and businesses anticipate changes in consumer demand and adjust their strategies accordingly. Understanding these trends can lead to more informed decisions in economic planning and financial forecasting.

Scalable probabilistic forecasting in retail with gradient boosted trees: A practitioner’s approach

The recent M5 competition has advanced the state-of-the-art in retail forecasting. However, there are important differences between the competition challenge and the challenges we face in a large e-commerce company. The datasets in our scenario are larger (hundreds of thousands of time series), and e-commerce can afford to have a larger stock assortment than brick-and-mortar retailers, leading to more intermittent data. To scale to larger dataset sizes with feasible computational effort, we investigate a two-layer hierarchy, namely the decision level with product unit sales and an aggregated level, e.g., through warehouse-product aggregation, reducing the number of series and degree of intermittency. We propose a top-down approach to forecasting at the aggregated level, and then disaggregate to obtain decision-level forecasts. Probabilistic forecasts are generated under distributional assumptions. The proposed scalable method is evaluated on both a large propreitary dataset, as well as the publically available Corporación Favorita and M5 datasets. We are able to show the differences in characteristics of the e-commerce and brick-and-mortar retail datasets. Notably, our top-down forecasting framework enters the top 50 of the original M5 competition, even with models trained at a higher level under a much simpler setting.

Crude oil price forecasting with multivariate selection, machine learning, and a nonlinear combination strategy

Crude oil price forecasting has been one of the research hotspots in the field of energy economics, which plays a crucial role in energy supply and economic development. However, numerous influencing factors bring serious challenges to crude oil price forecasting, and existing research has room for further improvement in terms of an integrated research roadmap that combines impact factor analysis with predictive modelling. This study aims to examine the impact of financial market factors on the crude oil market and to propose a nonlinear combined forecasting framework based on common variables. Four types of daily exogenous financial market variables are introduced: commodity prices, exchange rates, stock market indices, and macroeconomic indicators for ten indicators. First, various variable selection methods generate different variable subsets, providing more diversity and reliability. Next, common variables in the subset of variables are selected as key features for subsequent models. Then, four models predict crude oil prices using common features as inputs and obtain the prediction results for each model. Finally, the nonlinear mechanism of the deep learning technology is introduced to combine above single prediction results. Experimental results reveal that commodity and foreign exchange factors in financial markets are critical determinants of crude oil market volatility over the long term, as observed in experiments conducted on the West Texas Intermediate and Brent oil price datasets. The proposed model demonstrates strong performance regarding average absolute percentage error, recorded at 2.9962% and 2.4314%, respectively, indicating high forecasting accuracy and robustness. This forecasting framework offers an effective methodology for predicting crude oil prices and enhances understanding the crude oil market.

Integrated Systematic Framework for Forecasting China’s Consumer Confidence: A Machine Learning Approach

This study aims to introduce a novel approach for predicting China’s consumer confidence index (CCI), a key economic indicator that reflects consumers’ confidence in current and future economic conditions. While traditional statistical models and economic indicators are the primary tools for forecasting CCI, their reliance on linear assumptions limits their ability to capture the complex, dynamic relationships inherent in economic systems. In response, this study proposes a two-step method that integrates social network analysis (SNA) and machine learning (ML) to enhance prediction accuracy by accounting for the nonlinear interactions and systemic interdependencies that drive consumer confidence. The use of SNA enables the identification of critical variables and their interconnected roles in shaping consumer sentiment, while ML models, specifically the gradient boosting decision tree (GBDT), leverage these relationships to provide more precise predictions. Utilizing monthly data from 1999 to 2023, the combined SNA and GBDT approach significantly improves the accuracy of CCI forecasts, particularly during periods of high volatility. The results of this study hold substantial value for policymakers, market analysts, and economists, as they offer a systems-oriented framework for economic forecasting. By demonstrating the effectiveness of combining SNA with ML technologies, this research not only advances the methodological toolkit for economic forecasting, but also provides a new lens through which the complex, adaptive nature of economic systems can be better understood and managed. This integrated approach paves the way for future developments in forecasting models that more accurately reflect the evolving dynamics of consumer confidence in a rapidly changing economic environment.

Forecasting to support EMS tactical planning: what is important and what is not.

Forecasting emergency medical service (EMS) call volumes is critical for resource allocation and planning. The development of many commercial and free software packages has made a variety of forecasting methods accessible. Practitioners, however, are left with little guidance on selecting the most appropriate method for their needs. Using 5 years of data from 3 cities in Alberta, we compute exponential smoothing and benchmark forecasts for 8-hour periods for each ambulance station catchment area and with a forecast horizon of two weeks-a spatio-temporal resolution appropriate for tactical planning. The methods that we consider differ on three spectra: the number and type of time-series components, whether forecasts are computed individually or jointly, and the way in which forecasts at a specific resolution are converted to forecasts at the resolution of interest. We find that it is important to include a weekly seasonal component when forecasting EMS demand. Multiplicative seasonality, however, shows no benefit over additive seasonality. Adding other time-series components (e.g., trend, ARMA errors, Box-Cox transformation) does not improve performance. Spatial resolutions of station catchment area and lower, and temporal resolution of 4-24 hours perform similarly. We adapt an existing hierarchical forecasting framework to a two-dimensional spatio-temporal hierarchy, but find that hierarchical reconciliation of forecasts does not improve performance at the forecast resolution of interest for tactical planning. Neither does jointly forecasting time series. We show that added complexity does not materially improve forecasting performance. The simple methods that we find perform well are easy to implement and interpret, making implementation in practice more likely. In a simulation study we alter the empirical weekly patterns and demonstrate how extreme differences between the weekly seasonality patterns of different regions cause hierarchically-reconciled bottom-up approaches to outperform top-down approaches.

Scale-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate time series (MTS) forecasting has attracted much attention in many intelligent applications. It is not a trivial task, as we need to consider both intra-variable dependencies and inter-variable dependencies. However, existing works are designed for specific scenarios, and require much domain knowledge and expert efforts, which is difficult to transfer between different scenarios. In this paper, we propose a scale-aware neural architecture search framework for MTS forecasting (SNAS4MTF). A multi-scale decomposition module transforms raw time series into multi-scale sub-series, which can preserve multi-scale temporal patterns. An adaptive graph learning module infers the different inter-variable dependencies under different time scales without any prior knowledge. For MTS forecasting, a search space is designed to capture both intra-variable dependencies and inter-variable dependencies at each time scale. The multi-scale decomposition, adaptive graph learning, and neural architecture search modules are jointly learned in an end-to-end framework. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that SNAS4MTF achieves a promising performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

Spatial–Temporal-Correlation-Constrained Dynamic Graph Convolutional Network for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Accurate traffic flow prediction in road networks is essential for intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Since traffic data are collected from the road network with spatial topological and time series sequences, the traffic flow prediction is regarded as a spatial–temporal prediction task. With the powerful ability to model the non-Euclidean data, the graph convolutional network (GCN)-based models have become the mainstream framework for traffic forecasting. However, existing GCN-based models either use the manually predefined graph structure to capture the spatial features, ignoring the heterogeneity of road networks, or simply perform 1-D convolution with fixed kernel to capture the temporal dependencies of traffic data, resulting in insufficient long-term temporal feature extraction. To solve those issues, a spatial–temporal correlation constrained dynamic graph convolutional network (STC-DGCN) is proposed for traffic flow forecasting. In STC-DGCN, a spatial–temporal embedding encoder module (STEM) is first constructed to encode the dynamic spatial relationships for road networks at different time steps. Then, a temporal feature encoder module with heterogeneous time series correlation modeling (TFE-HCM) and a spatial feature encoder module with dynamic multi-graph modeling (SFE-DCM) are designed to generate dynamic graph structures for effectively capturing the dynamic spatial and temporal correlations. Finally, a spatial–temporal feature fusion module based on a gating fusion mechanism (STM-GM) is proposed to effectively learn and leverage the inherent spatial–temporal relationships for traffic flow forecasting. Experimental results from three real-world traffic flow datasets demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed STC-DGCN compared with state-of-the-art traffic flow forecasting models.

Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Modeling for Enhanced Air Quality Prediction: Implications for Information Management and Public Health Decision Support Systems

Air quality forecasting has significant implications for environmental monitoring, public health, and information management systems. This study proposes three advanced deep learning models: Graph Neural Networks with Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Attention (GNN-DSTA), Multi-Resolution Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (MRC-RNN), and Variational Autoencoders with Spatio-Temporal Latent Embeddings (VAE-STLE). These models address the challenges of capturing complex spatio-temporal dependencies in environments with sparse data samples. The GNN-DSTA model introduces a temporal attention mechanism that dynamically captures evolving spatial-temporal dependencies. MRC-RNN combines CNN's spatial pattern recognition with RNN's temporal modeling across multiple spatial resolutions. VAE-STLE provides a probabilistic framework for robust and interpretable forecasting. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in prediction accuracy: GNN-DSTA reduces RMSE by 15-20%, MRC-RNN improves accuracy by 12-15%, and VAE-STLE shows a 10-12% improvement with enhanced uncertainty estimation. These models advance AQI predictions through dynamic attention mechanisms, multi-resolution analysis, and probabilistic forecasting. Furthermore, this study explores the implications of these advanced predictions for information management and public health decision support systems. We discuss the integration of real-time data, scalability considerations for large-scale deployments, user interface design for effective communication of predictions, and ethical considerations in using AI-driven models for public health decision-making. The proposed approach not only enhances the accuracy and reliability of AQI predictions but also provides a framework for developing more effective and responsive public health interventions and environmental policies.

An Adaptive Transfer Learning Framework for Data-Scarce HVAC Power Consumption Forecasting

An Adaptive Transfer Learning Framework for Data-Scarce HVAC Power Consumption Forecasting

Joint Short-term Power Forecasting of Hydro-Wind-Photovoltaic Considering Spatiotemporal Delay of Weather Processes

Regional integrated energy systems (RIES) represented by hydro, wind, and solar energy are crucial avenues for future clean energy development, fully leveraging their complementarity can facilitate the orderly supply of renewable energy, significantly enhance the level of new energy consumption, and make outstanding contributions to achieving carbon neutrality goals. However, run-of-river hydropower (RHP), wind power (WP), and photovoltaic (PV) are affected by the chaotic characteristics of the weather system, with significant random fluctuations, and their output characteristics have significant heterogeneity, which brings a big challenge for the complementary coordinated scheduling. The high-accuracy power prediction of RHP, WP, and PV in the region is one of the key means for solving the above problems. To meet this challenge, by analyzing the spatio-temporal correlation properties between weather processes and station output, a novel joint prediction framework for short-term power forecasting (STPF) of regional hydro-wind-PV clusters is proposed. Firstly, to solve the problem of significant heterogeneity of water, wind, and solar, a Differentiated Spatio-Temporal Mixture Network (DSTMN) is proposed, which differentially encodes the weather and power information at multiple locations, enabling the extraction of common features while preserving their specificities, which addresses the difficulty of representing the inherent correlation patterns between wide-area meteorological information and heterogeneous energy sources. Secondly, to further explore the spatio-temporal correlation between meteorological information and power information, to improve the forecasting performance of the model, a spatio-temporal-lagged correlation (STLC) that can quantify their spatio-temporal delays is proposed. By analyzing the correlation characteristics between regional grid numerical weather prediction (NWP) information and station output at different spatial and temporal scales, the optimal spatial location and delay time of NWP inputs under the current scenario are determined for each station. Based on this, the best NWP scene probabilistic transfer model is established based on the Rank Bayesian Ensemble (RBE) method. By fitting the conditional probability distribution of the current best NWP spatiotemporal location and the 2nd day’s best NWP spatiotemporal location, providing a reliable input for the STPF model. Finally, a case study with 164 hydro-wind-solar stations in China demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method. Specifically, we achieved an accuracy improvement of 0.46% — 11.03% on the 2nd day of forecasting compared to benchmark methods.

An accurate and efficient forecast framework for fine PM2.5 maps using spatiotemporal recurrent neural networks

Commonly used numerical prediction models for PM2.5 maps suffer from low accuracy and high computation cost, which cannot meet the requirements for fine-scale air pollution control. In this study, we propose a framework based on the spatiotemporal recurrent neural network (PredRNN) to efficiently generate accurate 3-h and 6-km PM2.5 maps with a lead time of 5 days. In this framework, two PredRNN networks are initially utilized to forecast PM2.5 concentration at ground monitoring sites and the spatial distribution of aerosol optical depth (AOD) by assimilating the output of numerical prediction model. Subsequently, the 3-h and 6-km PM2.5 forecasted maps with a lead time of 5 days can be inferred by establishing the regression links between the forecasted results of PM2.5 concentration at ground sites and AOD maps. We evaluate the proposed framework in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration region during 2017–2020. Compared with the numerical prediction products of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, the proposed framework achieves higher accuracy, with R2 of 0.83 at the forecast base time and 0.70 at the fifth day. The spatial information richness is also enhanced by approximately 15.67% according to the information entropy metrics. Notably, the proposed framework only requires 1 min for forecasting 5-days PM2.5 maps. These results demonstrate that our framework can efficiently generate accurate and fine PM2.5 maps with a lead time of 5 days.

Transforming Mexico’s Electric Load Infrastructure: A Quantile Transformer Network Deep Learning Approach, 2019-2020

To transform Mexico's electric load infrastructure, accurate electric load forecasts are required that are crucial to efficiently allocate resources, maintain system stability, and manage energy. The purpose of this study is to use the Quantile Transformer Network (QTN) as a novel approach for a deep learning framework for load forecasting, emphasizing its potential and practical consequences in enhancing the accuracy of load forecasting in real-world energy systems. Moreover, it is shown that QTN efficiently captures complex patterns, temporal relationships and interconnections among factors that influence electric load. The dataset utilized consists of past records of energy consumption in the Baja California System in Mexico. It includes several factors such as electricity demand, marginal prices, temporal characteristics, temperature-related variables, seasonal patterns, and holidays. Additionally, QTN is combined with the Rainbow Technique (RT) to manage categorical variables, resulting in the creation of a unified feature called category. In this case, RT examines the connections between descriptive phrases that reflect distinct combinations of categorical factors depending on the load values. Moreover, this research shows that the common Quantile Regression (QR) outperforms QTN in capturing dependencies in sequential data. Finally, several recommendations for promoting Mexico's Electric Load Infrastructure are provided.

Framework for multivariate carbon price forecasting: A novel hybrid model

The complex characteristics of volatility and non-linearity of carbon price pose a serious challenge to accurately predict carbon price. Therefore, this study proposes a new hybrid model for multivariate carbon price forecasting, including feature selection, deep learning, intelligent optimization algorithms, model combination and evaluation indicators. First, this study collects and organizes the historical carbon price series of Hubei and Shanghai as well as the influencing factors in five dimensions including structured and unstructured data, totaling twenty variables. Second, data dimensionality reduction is performed and input variables are obtained using the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, followed by the introduction of nine advanced deep learning models to predict carbon price and compare the prediction effects. Then, through the combination of models, three models with the best performance are combined with Pelican optimization algorithm to construct a hybrid forecasting model. Finally, the experimental results show that the developed forecasting model outperforms other comparation models in terms of prediction accuracy, stability and statistical hypothesis testing, and exhibits excellent prediction performance. Furthermore, this study also applies the developed model to European carbon market price prediction and uses the Hubei carbon market as an example for quantitative trading simulation, and the empirical results further verify its robust prediction performance and investment application value. In conclusion, the proposed hybrid prediction model can not only provide high-precision carbon market price prediction for the government and corporate decision makers, but also help investors optimize their trading strategies and improve their returns.

Stock Price Prediction in Indonesia's Mining Sector Using a Hybrid Conv1D-LSTM Model

This study presents a novel approach to forecasting stock prices in Indonesia's mining sector by leveraging a hybrid model combining Convolutional Neural Networks (Conv1D) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Given the volatile nature of stock markets and the specific characteristics of the mining industry, accurate prediction models are essential for investors and analysts. The hybrid Conv1D-LSTM model integrates the feature extraction capabilities of Conv1D with the sequence learning strengths of LSTM, providing a robust framework for time series forecasting.

Dynamic elicitation and forecasting innovation requirement of smart product-service system via user-manufacturer value co-creation perspective using multi-source data

Achieving greater efficiency and lower resource consumption is a constant pursuit for successfully developing smart product-service system (PSS). Conducting dynamic requirements analysis is increasingly important in the process while the value co-creation of smart PSS stakeholders has not been sufficiently considered. This study adopts a user-manufacturer value co-creation perspective to explore smart PSS dynamic requirement elicitation and forecasting. Using multi-source data of user online reviews, historical descriptive texts and patent abstracts, this study dynamically elicits the smart PSS innovation requirements using dynamic topic model (DTM) and bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT). Furthermore, the key innovation requirements of smart PSS are identified by integrating their importance and satisfaction values into a dynamic importance-performance analysis (DIPA). Then, the trend of smart PSS key innovation requirements is predicted by the grey forecasting model to determine the smart PSS improvement direction. An empirical study of smartwatch service system is conducted to validate the proposed approach. By blending both user and manufacturer requirements, this study provides a novel framework for dynamic requirement elicitation and forecasting of smart PSS based on multi-source data. It contributes to facilitating the value co-creation during smart PSS development to optimize manufacturer’s R&D resource allocation and enhance user experience.

Ensemble‐based monthly to seasonal precipitation forecasting for Iran using a regional weather model

AbstractMonthly and seasonal precipitation forecasts can potentially assist disaster risk reduction and water resource management. The aim of this study is to assess the skill of an ensemble framework for monthly and seasonal precipitation forecasts over Iran by focusing on system design and model performance evaluation. The ensemble framework presented in this paper is based on a one‐way double‐nested model that uses Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) modelling system to downscale the second version of the NCEP Climate Forecast System (CFSv2). The performance is evaluated for October–April period at 1‐, 2‐ and 3‐month lead time. Multiple initial conditions, model parameters and physics are used to construct ensemble members. Using quantile mapping (QM) method, the outputs of the model are bias corrected. This methodology is applied for two periods: (i) climatology from 2000 to 2019 to evaluate the model's ability to precipitation forecast on a monthly and seasonal time scale; (ii) the forecast for 2020 to evaluate the model's performance operationally. The model evaluation is performed using the continuous (e.g., RMSE, r, MBE, NSE) and categorical (e.g., POD, FAR, PC, Heidke skill score) assessment metrics. We conclude that model outputs were improved by the QM bias correction method. According to results, the proposed ensemble framework can accurately predict amount of monthly and seasonal precipitation in Iran with an accuracy of 58 to 45% for lead‐1 to 3. For all three lead times, the averaged NSE, CC, MBE, and RMSE were 0.4, 0.56, −15.5, and 41.6, indicating that the framework has reasonable performance. Our results suggest that precipitation forecast accuracy varies with lead time, so the accuracy for lead‐1 is higher than lead‐2 and lead‐3. Additionally, the model's accuracy differs in various regions of the country and decreases in the spring. Using the approach for an operational case, it was found that the spatial features of precipitation predicted by the framework were close to those observed.

A reconstruction-based secondary decomposition-ensemble framework for wind power forecasting

Accurate wind power forecasting remains challenging due to the instability and volatility of wind power generation. Decomposition methods are widely used to improve forecasting performance by extracting complex fluctuation patterns from wind power series. However, previous decomposition-based models ignore the global interactions across sub-signals when forecasting the sub-signals separately and miss critical local details in sub-signals when modelling all the sub-signals in a single forecasting model. To address this issue, we propose a novel “Reconstruction-based Secondary Decomposition-Ensemble (RSDE)” framework for wind power forecasting, which simultaneously preserves the global interactions and local details. Firstly, an RSD method is adopted to extract fluctuation patterns from different frequency domains: decomposing the wind power by complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (CEEMDAN), reconstructing the primary sub-signals from specific frequency domains by spectral clustering (SC) and further decomposing the reconstructed sub-signals by singular spectrum analysis (SSA). Secondly, temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) are applied to forecast each reconstructed sub-signal by fitting the corresponding secondary decomposed sub-signals, which could effectively capture the local and global features from specific frequency domains. Finally, an ensemble strategy with error correction is adopted to obtain the final forecasting results by combining the forecasted reconstructed sub-signals and corresponding error forecasting results. Four wind power datasets with different time resolutions are introduced to evaluate the forecasting performance. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RSDE framework consistently outperforms the benchmark models. Moreover, the proposed sub-signal modelling strategy improves the forecasting performance by more than 30% on average, and the ensemble strategy with error correction improves the forecasting performance by about 10% on average.

Multi-energy load forecasting for integrated energy system based on sequence decomposition fusion and factors correlation analysis

Considering the seasonal and cyclical fluctuation of loads and the complexity of multi-energy coupling, this paper proposes a novel load forecasting model based on sequence decomposition fusion and factors correlation analysis. Firstly, the variational mode decomposition (VMD) is used to decompose the highly complex load sequences and the novel influencing factors correlation analysis (ICA) is proposed to select strong factors and remove weak feature variables to construct the input and output set. Secondly, this paper proposes the combined forecasting framework MTL-CNN-BiGRU-Attention to simultaneously forecast the cooling, heat, and electricity loads, along with BiGRU used as the hard sharing layer to deeply explore the coupling information between different types of loads. Meanwhile, the gray wolf algorithm (GWO) is improved to accurately and quickly search for the optimal hyperparameters of the model. Finally, the dataset of a comprehensive energy station in Shanghai is used to test our model, and the results show that the MAPE of the cooling and electricity loads forecasting achieve 5.501% and 5.821% in summer and 5.921%, 7.899% and 7.541% for the cooling, heat and electricity loads in transition season and winter, which confirms the effectiveness and superiority of our model.

A Hybrid Forecasting Structure Based on Arima and Artificial Neural Network Models

This study involves the development of a hybrid forecasting framework that integrates two different models in a framework to improve prediction capability. Although the concept of hybridization is not a new issue in forecasting, our approach presents a new structure that combines two standard simple forecasting models uniquely for superior performance. Hybridization is significant for complex data sets with multiple patterns. Such data sets do not respond well to simple models, and hybrid models based on the integration of various forecasting tools often lead to better forecasting performance. The proposed architecture includes serially connected ARIMA and ANN models. The original data set is first processed by ARIMA. The error (i.e., residuals) of the ARIMA is sent to the ANN for secondary processing. Between these two models, there is a classification mechanism where the raw output of the ARIMA is categorized into three groups before it is sent to the secondary model. The algorithm is tested on well-known forecasting cases from the literature. The proposed model performs better than existing methods in most cases.